Manufacturers of computing devices that use systems-on-chips, microchips, or other integrated circuits (herein collectively referred to as “ICs”) perform thermal/power testing of their devices to confirm that their products comply with thermal limits and design power and battery life specifications for all ICs received from IC manufactures. The thermal/power characteristics of a device utilizing a particular IC depend on, among other things, the current leakage of the IC and the voltage required for the IC to achieve a particular operational speed (e.g., a first IC may require 950 millivolts and a second IC may require 875 millivolts to achieve the same operational frequency of 384 MHz).
Currently, device manufacturers and IC manufacturers must contend with a lack of uniformity in the performance of the ICs within a given batch (e.g., ICs made in the same production run). In a large production run, each IC has slightly different physical characteristics due to intrinsic, natural variations in the IC's component materials, which introduce variability in the performance of the ICs in the batch and the devices that use those ICs. For example, some ICs may have higher current leakage and/or higher voltage requirements than other ICs in the same batch. Therefore, the process of performing thermal/power testing of devices implementing ICs involves substantial time and effort because the tests must account for the natural variation in the production of ICs in a production batch.
To accomplish thermal/power testing, device manufactures install into their devices ICs provided to them by IC manufactures that represent the best and worst cases of leakage current, processing speed, and thermal performance. These best and worst cases are referred to as “corner cases,” and ICs that exhibit these best and worst cases are referred to as “corner-case ICs.” Thus, to gain an accurate sense of the performance quality of devices that are installed with different ICs in a batch, manufacturers and other testing facilities must perform various tests on multiple computing devices implementing the corner-case ICs to determine the outer bound performances of their products. To support device manufacturers, IC manufacturers must select the corner-case ICs from their production runs and provide those several ICs to each computing device manufacturer. Thus, IC manufacturers must spend an extensive amount of time identifying ICs for each corner case to be tested by each of their customers. Further, selecting corner-case ICs may be particularly difficult because there may be only a very small number of ICs with performance characteristics close to a desired corner case.
In addition to the time and expense of identifying corner-case ICs, current processes for testing devices that include corner-case ICs may result in physical damage that hinders further (e.g., confirmatory) testing of those devices. In a typical example, computing device manufacturers must solder the corner-case ICs into their test products. After testing, the corner-case ICs are sent back to the IC manufacturer for further testing while still soldered to the test computing devices. At the IC manufacturer, additional testing may be difficult because the corner-case ICs must be unsoldered and re-soldered to other test systems, which may physically damage the corner-case ICs, thereby leading to incomplete or incorrect test results.